Louise Rosenblatt

Louise Michelle Rosenblatt (1904 to 2005) was an American university professor and researcher into the teaching of literature, best known for the transactional theory of reading. Born in Atlantic City, she studied at Barnard College and took a doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in 1931. She taught at Barnard and Brooklyn College, then from 1948 until her retirement in 1972 was Professor of English Education at New York University's School of Education. Influenced by John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, she argued in Literature as Exploration (1938), published by the Progressive Education Association, and in The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978) that meaning arises from a transaction between reader and text, and that no two readings are the same. She distinguished efferent reading, taken for information, from aesthetic reading, enjoyed for its form and feeling, and she tied the teaching of literature to democratic life. She is often grouped with reader-response theorists, a label she contested.